Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog

A Fun Gastronomical Dataset: What's on the Menu?

Sep 21st, 2016

I just found a fun food themed dataset that I’d never heard about and that I thought I’d share. It’s from a project called What’s on the menu where the New York Public Library has crowdsourced a digitization of their collection of historical restaurant menus. The collection stretches all the way back to the 19th century and well into the 1990’s, and on the home page it is stated that there are “1,332,271 dishes transcribed from 17,545 menus”. Here is one of those menus, from a turn of the (old) century Chinese-American restaurant:

The data is freely available in csv format (yay!) and here I ‘ll just show how to the get the data into R and I’ll use it to plot the popularity of some foods over time.

First we’re going to download the data, “unzip” csv files into a temporary directory, and read them into R.

The resulting tables together describe the contents of the menus, but in order to know which dish was on which menu we need to join together the four tables. While doing this we’re also going to remove some uninteresting columns and remove some records that were not coded correctly.

Personally I’d go for the Stuffed Figs and Dates at the Waldorf-Astoria followed by some Assorted Small Cakes 21 years later at the Astor. If you want to download this slightly processed version of the dataset it’s available here in csv format. We can also see which are the most common menu items in the dataset:

That coffee is king isn’t that surprising, but the popularity of celery seems weird. My current hypothesis is that “celery” often refers to some kind of celery salad, or maybe it was common as a snack in the New York area in the 1900s. It should be remembered that the dataset does not represent what people ate in general, but is based on what menus were collected by the New York public library (presumably from the New York area). Also the bulk of the menus are from between 1900 and 1980:

Even though it’s not completely clear what the dataset represents we could still have a look at some food trends over time. Below I’m going to go through a couple of common foodstuffs and, for each decennium, calculate what proportion of menus includes that foodstuff.

Ice cream wins, but again I’m not sure what to make of how ice cream varies over time. Maybe it’s just an artifact of how the data was collected or maybe it actually reflects the icegeist somehow. What about French fries vs. French peas:

Anyway, this is a really cool dataset and I barely scratched the surface of what could be done with it. If you decide to explore this dataset further, and you make some plots and/or analyses, do send me a link and I will link to it here.

To finish off let’s look at this elegant cocktail menu from 1937 which, among cocktails and fizzes, advertises tiny cocktail tamales: